Page 24 of Belong to Me
THREE DAYS.
I sit in the penthouse with the curtains drawn. I don’t eat. I don’t shower. I drink, but even the drinking loses its purpose by the second night because the whisky doesn’t reach the place where she was and nothing does.
On the second day, Andrei comes.
He doesn’t knock. He has a key, or the concierge lets him in, or he walks through walls. I don’t know. I don’t care. He walks into the dark penthouse and he finds me on the couch where I’ve been for hours and he sits down.
He doesn’t speak.
Andrei doesn’t speak when words are useless. He sits on the other end of the couch with the scar on his face catching what little light leaks through the curtain edge, and he is the twin who was built for violence and who wields it only in protection, and he protects me now by sitting in my darkness and asking nothing.
We sit for hours. He gets up once, brings water, sets it in front of me. I drink it. He sits back down. The harbour turns from afternoon to evening outside the curtains. The city hums. Monaco doesn’t stop because one man is sitting in the dark learning what it costs to be wrong about the one person who mattered.
At midnight, he stands. He puts his hand on my shoulder. One squeeze. He leaves.
I am alone.
And somewhere in Idaho, so is she.
DAISY
The bus station in Nice smells like diesel and coffee and the particular loneliness of people who are leaving places they didn’t choose to leave.
I have one bag. The bag holds three changes of clothes, my toothbrush, the mystery novel I was halfway through, and my passport. I left everything else. The apartment, the navy dress, the green dress, the espresso cups, the filing system I built at Keyes. I left it all because none of it was mine. None of it was ever mine.
The bus to the airport leaves soon. From Nice, I fly to Paris. From Paris, I fly to Boise. From Boise, my mother will pick me up in the truck with the bad heater and the radio that only gets two stations, and she will ask me about Monaco and I will tell her it was beautiful and I didn’t stay and I won’t tell her why.
I sit on the metal bench with my bag between my feet and my hands in my lap and I am very tired. The kind of tired that lives behind your eyes and in your bones and under your skin and has nothing to do with sleep.
My hand goes to my stomach.
I don’t know why. There is no reason for it. I’m not hungry. I haven’t been hungry in days. I’m not sick. The nausea from Blythe’s coffee shop has passed. My hand simply moves, of its own accord, and rests against my abdomen, and I hold it there and it feels like holding something I can’t name yet. Something that hasn’t announced itself yet.
The bus pulls in. Diesel and dust. I pick up my bag. I board.
Idaho.
TWO MONTHS LATER.
The grocery store parking lot in Cork is hot. August in Idaho is scorching and dry and the asphalt radiates heat through the soles of my shoes and I am carrying two bags of groceries and a gallon of milk and the sun is in my eyes and the world tilts.
It tilts slowly. Then all at once. The asphalt rises. The milk falls. The bags split and oranges roll under a pickup truck and the sky goes white and my knees go soft and the last thing I hear beforethe ground meets me is a woman’s voice, distant and concerned, sayinghoney, honey, are you okay,and I am not okay, and the pavement is warm against my cheek, and my hand is on my stomach.
Chapter ****10
Chapter 10
DAISY
The ceiling is white. The lights are fluorescent. The smell is antiseptic and industrial soap and the particular staleness of recirculated air, and I’m lying on my back in a hospital bed in Cork, Idaho, and the man sitting in the chair beside me is Anton Almazov.
I’m not surprised.
I should be. I should be asking how he found me, how he got here, why he’s sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital in a town he’s never heard of in a state he once asked me to describe over dinner. But I’m not surprised because I have spent two months carrying the weight of him inside me, not just the pregnancy, though that too, but the weight of his absence, which turns out to be heavier than his presence ever was, and some part of me has been waiting for this chair and this man and this fluorescent ceiling since the parking lot asphalt met my cheek.
He’s sitting very still. His hands are on his knees. He’s wearing clothes I’ve never seen, dark jeans, a grey pullover, no suit, no tie, no Ace Royale armour, and he hasn’t shaved and his eyes are bloodshot and he’s the most beautiful thing in this ugly room and I hate that he is.
“You know, don’t you.”
